The boyfriend returns, running back to the young woman’s doorway panic-stricken and breathless. He urgently asks her what’s wrong.

She is beside herself, wide-eyed, very afraid, in tears, and her voice is faltering as she attempts to explain to him that she awoke from her nightmare to find bizarre and terrifying marks on her face and body. After seeing the malevolent marks, he is aghast, and momentarily speechless.

After a long pause, he frantically asks her what they are. She screams back that she doesn’t know, so he insists they go to a hospital immediately.

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As in the first opera, our protagonist is again plagued by fearful dreams. Her nightmare, acted out for our benefit, depicts her standing still on a surreal and desolate plain, and looking increasingly frightened under an eerie, moonless and starless night sky.

Nine demons with lanterns dance unpredictably toward, past and around her, menacingly and threateningly. We see her become increasingly shaken at all of this harrassment, as that feeling of helpless utter terror so common to nightmares fully grips her mind.

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In this necrowaltz, Demons frenetically praise their leader in both song and dance, to a theme consisting of sped-up and grotesque embellishments of the plainsong motif we heard in “The Friendship Waltz”. During the eventual peak of their manic glee over the prospect of more human eternal damnation, the voice of God is suddenly and shockingly heard in one word: “Enough!!” The now shrieking and wailing wraiths scatter in terror.

God’s following few and loud words to them speak of the young woman in the same way that He famously spoke to Satan of “My servant Job” in the Bible. We then see the young woman, and hear her plaintively giving up on ever again attempting to help bring her friends to Christ. Judging from what she has just heard from them, she now feels that such an attempt is futile.

But suddenly, we hear angels voicing robust encouragement, exhorting her to “Go!!” We hear this audibly, but she hears with her heart. She resolves to go to her friends, and to try one last time: She will share the Good News with them herself — and on their turf this time.

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Its title parodying that of “The Friendship Waltz”, as well as more subtly suggesting the words “false” and “faults”, this minor-key embellishment of the former work once again features the group of four friends, who, short of blissfully singing simplistic songs about the supposed meaning of life, as they did before, now instead begin to shallowly gossip against their “friend”, the young woman whom they recently abandoned — and who now covertly is overhearing them, having just now arrived to try and talk with them again.

Though hurtful and sad to the young woman, her friends’ current behavior is simply delightful to one character in particular, and proves to be precisely what that “Master Deceiver” has been attempting to arrange, as we discover in the following piece, which bears Satan’s title.

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